FLORENCE.

We slept no-where, except perhaps in the carriage,
between our last residence at Bologna and this delightful
city, to which we passed apparently through a new
region of the earth, or even air; clambering up mountains
covered with snow, and viewing with amazement the little
vallies between, where, after quitting the summer season,
all glowing with heat and spread into verdure, we
found cherry-trees in blossom, oaks and walnuts scarcely
beginning to bud. These mountains are however
much below those of Savoy for dignity and beauty of
appearance, though high enough to be troublesome,
and barren enough to be desolate. These Appenines
have been called by some the Back Bone of Italy, as
Varenius and others style the Mountains of the Moon
in Africa, Back Bone of the World; and these, as they
do, run in a long chain down the middle of the Peninsula
they are placed in; but being rounded at top are supposed
to be aquatick, while the Alps, Andes, &c. are of
late acknowledged by philosophers to be volcanic,
as the most lofty of them terminate in points
of granite, wholly devoid of horizontal strata, and
without petrifactions contained in them,

Here the tracts around display
How impetuous ocean’s sway Once with
wasteful fury spread The wild waves o’er
each mountain’s head.

PARSONS.

But the offspring of fire somehow should be
more striking than that of water, however violent
might have been the concussion that produced them;
and there is no comparison between the sensations felt
in passing the Roche Melon, and these more neatly-moulded
Appenines; upon whose tops I am told too no lakes
have been formed, as on Mount Cenis, or even on Snowdon
in North Wales, where a very beautiful lake adorns
the summit of the rock; which affords trout precisely
such as you eat before you go down to Novalesa, but
not so large.

Sir William Hamilton, however, is the man to be referred
to in all these matters; no man has examined the peculiar
properties and general nature of mountains, those
which vomit fire in particular, with half as much
application, inspired by half as much genius, as he
has done.

We arrived late at our inn, an English one they say
it is; and many of the last miles were passed very
pleasantly by my maid and myself, in anticipating
the comforts we should receive by finding ourselves
among our own country folks. In good time! and
by once more eating, sleeping, &c. all in the English
way, as her phrase is. Accordingly, here are
small low beds again, soft and clean, and down pillows;
here are currant tarts, which the Italians scorn to
touch, but which we are happy and delighted to pay
not ten but twenty times their value for, because a
currant tart is so much in the English way:
and here are beans and bacon in a climate where it
is impossible that bacon should be either wholesome
or agreeable; and one eats infinitely worse than one
did at Milan, Venice, or Bologna: and infinitely
dearer too; but that makes it still more completely
in the English way.